


Alternative Remedies for War and Grief

by mustntgetmy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: First War with Voldemort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-23
Updated: 2016-08-23
Packaged: 2018-08-10 13:55:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7847695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mustntgetmy/pseuds/mustntgetmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first war begins, and Remus and Sirius deal with all the horrors around them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alternative Remedies for War and Grief

**Author's Note:**

> Written for rs_small_gifts 2015.

Nineteen, and they had just witnessed their first murder. Caradoc Dearborne and a hole blow through his chest. Nothing like the swell of green, the sudden absence behind the eyes, the loss of animation of the Killing Curse. This had been a hex, a grotesque punch of power, and he had stayed standing a moment afterwards, parts of his insides falling down in clumps on the grass, his face having time to register surprise, shock, fear before he fell forward and Lily started screaming.

Then more hexes came raining in, taking chunks of bark out of the trees, and it was James shouting now for Lily to just leave him, dammit, you can’t do anything for him now, _leave him_. She sobbed and screamed as they ran.

Trees, trees, endless trees, and the only clearing behind them, where the cottage had been, the Dark Mark hovering over it still. They flicked spells back over their shoulders, a shower of sparking red. Only Remus recovered enough of his wits to fire something other than a Stunning Spell. He threw some black and spiked charm at the trees and they began to fall behind them, cutting the pursuing Death Eaters off, giving them the time they needed to Apparate away.

The next few hours were the slow madness of remembered violence: shaking, rushing to vomit, forgetting basic words like “death” and “curse” when recounting what had happened to Dumbledore. It had been four of them there – Lily, James, Sirius, and Remus – and they had never been closer to each other than those few hours afterwards, or more distant from anyone else they saw.

Dumbledore told them all to go home. Said, with an awareness of the understatement, that they had done enough.

James and Lily returned to the flat they shared. Lily cleaned the already spotless kitchen to settle her nerves and James ordered takeaway. They held hands while they ate and talked for hours. About the war, about the risks they were taking, and about where this was all headed, ‘this’ being them, James-and-Lily. A house in the countryside, a wedding in the fall, a baby they would name Harry or Iris, a family, theirs. They went to bed near dawn and woke up adults, the path of their lives clear and neatly drawn.

Remus and Sirius opted to deal with their first confrontation of death differently.

Remus bought marijuana off a Muggle in a London park; Sirius provided the beer. Drunk first, then high, in a place neither of them knew well: the village Caradoc had grown up in. It had woods just like the ones they’d run through that morning and they walked in together on each other’s dare, the trees buckling under the pressure of the substances in their blood, the sky a black hollow filled by stars.

They ran again; they had to. There was something in the trees, and something in the sky, and something in their blood too. They’d watched someone die and that was always going to be there, pursuing them. Might as well run a bit, try to get away.

No telling how long they ran, or when it was they stopped. They only knew that it was raining, murky grayness swelling over the trees and sky, a cold rain, despite the season. They were shivering, spent. They huddled under a tree too small to cover both of them, shoulder to shoulder, then chest to chest. Breath on each other’s cheeks, breath on each other’s lips, and then – who first? It was Sirius, impetuous, reckless Sirius, who turned his head and kissed his friend, but it was Remus who, in the instant before, felt that dark, sweet twang go through him, and knew that this was coming.

This: heat and ache, hands and teeth. Sirius pulling them onto the wet grass, heedlessly, tearing off Remus’s clothes, remorselessly, licking away all the rain, drinking Remus up, pushing Remus’s legs apart and putting his head between them. Remus grabbing onto fallen leaves and dirt, mindlessly, gripping his hands in Sirius’s hair, savagely, pulling him away, rolling over, pinning him. The rain a steady, pattering darkness and Remus’s eyes glowing predatorily, hungrily. Sirius had seen Remus become the wolf, but never seen the wolf stare out from inside him. It scared him, the way a near escape scared him. An electric, twinging reminder that he was here, this was now, he was alive.

He smiled his maddest smile. “Come on,” he urged. “I know you want to.” He unbuttoned his shirt, baring throat and chest and stomach. Sirius Black, undone, in offering. How could Remus refuse?

He bent his head to Sirius’s, kissed him so hard that magic lanced up Sirius’s skin, turning the rain to steam so that Remus had to pour over him instead. His teeth scraping against Sirius’s nipple, his hands burning against Sirius’s inner thighs, his eyes bright as he thrust into Sirius and Sirius, as he moaned and arched, realized that he finally understood what it was like for Remus when the full moon rose. It was this: everything winnowed out of you but need. The need for skin, tender and alive. To feel it in your mouth, taste it between your teeth. To hold it against yourself and forget, for one startling starbright moment, that it could have been you falling onto the grass, growing cold, growing still, and then no longer growing at all.

The rain continued as they lay in a heap, their breathing steaming, the earth clumping into mud beneath them. They each made an attempt to start a sentence or question, but failed midway, the words hanging meaningless and abandoned in the air. They dressed with sweeps of magic, dried themselves off, and walked out of the woods.

When they came through the trees it was morning. They stood beneath the shadows of the trees for a moment, watching the thin rays of the sun break through the cloud cover. They might have walked away from each other then, first one, then the other, neither turning back, neither saying anything more about the night than to excuse that it had happened.

But instead, they turned to one another and gave each other private smiles – Sirius’s slightly sad and tender, Remus’s betraying a rare spark of hope – and for a moment it felt as if the world had been made right, Caradoc not dead, and the two of them still young and unmarked.

…

Caradoc was not the first casualty, and he was far from the last. People died, went missing, were found in pieces. The obituaries began to spread onto two full pages of the _Prophet_ , Order members and Death Eaters indistinguishable in the same black ink. They saw terrible things, and did terrible things. The nightmares were relentless, Dumbledore’s urgings to continue fighting the good fight were at times unbearable. There were nights no one could meet each other’s eyes.

And there was, amid the grieving and the blood, Sirius and Remus, messily pressed against each other in the hours before the funerals, the scorches of spell marks still smoking on their skin, begging each other for forgetfulness, unable to sleep if they weren’t together. In a forest or a flat, in the bitter chill of winter or the sultry heat of summer, they found each other, alone, disoriented by war, by death, by the sudden absence of their teens and the onset of their twenties. They didn’t talk about it or try to explain the way they felt. It would’ve only been excuses if they’d tried. _I need to take my mind off it for just a little while. It’s only cause you’re here, it’s only cause I know you so well. Please, please, don’t think. Just stay._

It was all desperation for a while, and when they came apart after sex it was with the dizziness of people newly woken from sleep and startled by the light of day. And then, as if growing accustomed to this light, during what felt like a ceasefire – three weeks without death or injury on either side – Remus found himself staying over in Sirius’s flat for an entire weekend.

“I can make us crepes,” Sirius announced when they arose from bed at midday, one of the most unexpected and ludicrous things Remus had ever heard him say.

“Or,” Remus said, “we could eat something that won’t give us food poisoning.”

Sirius responded to this by cuffing Remus across the face with a pillow.

“Eloquent as always,” Remus said, but Sirius had already gone to the kitchen.

It turned out that he could, actually, make crepes, a fact Remus had to eat both literally and figuratively. Sirius’s smugness lasted the entire meal, until Remus began to lick the sugar from his fingers. (They had eaten with their hands, because although Sirius could make crepes he could not, apparently, manage to buy silverware.)

“You can’t do that,” Sirius said, his voice husky, his gaze on Remus’s mouth. “You know what that does to me.”

Remus had laughed at first because he’d thought it was a joke, but then he realized that he did know precisely what it did to Sirius, and he realized too that he knew a thousand other small things that Sirius liked – and not all of them things they did in bed. These were not things he had known when they were in school, these were not things he had ever expected to learn. (He likes to watch the traffic pass on the street below at night; it calms him. He won’t eat in company until someone else has taken a bite first. He sings The Rolling Stones in the shower, Bob Dylan when he dresses. He likes to be held when he sleeps. He wakes up slowly, in fits and starts, and when he smiles, still half-asleep, it’s the best thing that Remus has ever seen.)

If someone had slipped Veritaserum into his tea he would have to say all these things and one more: I love you, Sirius. And if Sirius had to tell the truth would he say it too? 

(He would. He will.)

Twenty nearing twenty-one, and they had seen more death than they knew how to count. Sometimes they couldn’t even remember that Caradoc had been the first. The war was a maze they’d wandered into blindly, each turn as familiar as it was freshly horrifying. They fought fueled by the fear of more loss and it was this, more than Dumbledore’s righteous speeches, that kept them going.

But it was also this: a sunny kitchen, a crackling wireless, a tabletop dusted with sugar. Looking over and realizing that this pull to him wasn’t just need, wasn’t just because of the war. Remus, lowering his fingers from his lips, reaching over to touch the side of Sirius’s face, cupping his warmth. Sirius, kissing Remus’s wrist, helpless to stop himself from smiling dewily at him, careless of the damage it might cause, careless of what this feeling might make him say. The air charged with something deeper and more precarious than magic, the spell words short and simple and said just like this: _I’m in love with you. I’m in love with you. I’ll think about you when you leave. I’ll think about you all the time. But now, don’t go, please. Just stay._


End file.
